


the doppler effect

by fourteenlines



Category: The West Wing
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-14
Updated: 2020-01-14
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:08:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22252339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fourteenlines/pseuds/fourteenlines
Summary: Donna listens on election night.
Kudos: 5





	the doppler effect

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Anna for the speed-beta.

Her parents moved to Madison when she was twelve, but until then they lived in a little town that couldn't quite decide whether it wanted to be rural or suburban. Their house was a little house in a little neighborhood two blocks from the train tracks, but there was no such thing as the wrong side of the tracks in their town and so it meant nothing. 

Until she had her very first sleepover and Amanda Hall, beautiful even at age ten and the kind of girl Donna wished she could be, scowled over her Cheerios in the morning. 

"How do you sleep with the train going by all night? I _so_ couldn't sleep, like, at all." 

And Donna looked back with honest confusion in her wide eyes. "What do you mean? The train doesn't go by at night." 

Amanda Hall rolled her eyes. "Yeah. Whatever." 

Two months later Donna came down with chicken pox, and her mother clucked and said she should have gotten them sooner, because maybe she wouldn't have gotten so sick. She lay awake all night in misery, and discovered that Amanda Hall was right. She could hear the train from miles away, echoing as it came down the long straight line from the bridge over the river. The shrill, high whistle that she could hardly believe she'd never heard on other nights. The click-clack click-clack click-clack that she felt in her gut and finally, somewhere near dawn, lulled her to sleep. 

Sometimes she'd stay awake on purpose to listen to the train, and think, that train is going someplace. I could be going someplace too, if I were only on that train. 

Her grandmother came to stay that Christmas, and she smiled at Donna and said, "Oh, I don't know how you sleep with that train going by all night, Donnatella." 

And Donna shrugged, smiling. "You get used to it," she said. "I hardly even hear it." 

Her dad laughed and said he felt the same way about her mother. 

Donna doesn't live near the train tracks anymore, although sometimes she wishes she did. She doesn't need the fantasy, because she can't think of anywhere else she'd rather be. But the rattle and crack of a train on the rails still feels like a lullabye. 

She has sirens and traffic noise instead. Her apartment lies on a main thoroughfare, and cars whoosh by all night long. Even now, stumbling through the door at four in the morning, a steady stream of cars swish past. When she moved in four years ago, the sound would keep her up all night, and the sirens fed her anxiety. Now she can identify the distinct sirens of police, fire, ambulance within the first few seconds, and they only keep her up on nights like this, bone-tired and wired beyond all belief. She wonders why she even bothered coming home, when she'll have to be back at the White House in a few hours anyway. 

The bed is soft and warm, however, and Donna collapses into it without bothering to change clothes. She kicks off her shoes and slithers out of her pantyhose and doesn't care whether she'll have to dry clean this suit to get the wrinkles out. Cars move by three stories below, and a police car screams past, but they're no substitute for a high, clear train whistle. 

It's strange how a siren sounds as it moves past, loud and sudden and high, then trailing a long low whine after it. Her high school physics class explained it once, about the sound waves getting shorter as a moving source got closer, and stretching out behind as it moved away. She pictures the sound waves in her mind's eye, jumbled and frantic as a day at work and then slow as honey moving into the night. 

But a siren will never be a lullabye, because it screams with emergency and dread, not triumph. Trains molded the country into what it is today, forged a nation and conquered a land. Sirens are red as blood and sound like panic. As sleep finally pulls Donna under, she wonders what disasters the sirens will herald in the four years to come. 


End file.
